For the past few months, I have been seriously considering getting ahold of one of those 169time.com-modified DirecTV HD receivers (they add a firewire port) and adding support for it to MythTV to allow recording of high-definition programming from DirecTV. I do not claim to understand any of the legal issues surrounding this: all I know is that they've been in business for several years and evidently have lots of satisfied customers over at avsforum, which is a positive sign.
Well, I finally got around to calling them to ask several questions about what I'd need to do. Some of my questions weren't related to MythTV directly, but one in particular was, and the gentleman's answer directly motivates this message. The question was, is the source code to read the data from the firewire port open? The answer was "no." His justification, similar to that of most hardware vendors, is that revealing the source code would enable others to replicate his work and offer a similar service, underselling his business. I'm not going to get deep into the already tired argument (neigh-gh! NEIGH-GH-GH!!!) that this is a doomed strategy (i.e., if someone was able to figure it out once, then others would easily be able to reverse-engineer it or replicate the work were there a bigger market for these modifications). I simply find it ironic that a company whose product's primary reason for existing is greater openness feels the need to protect their intellectual property. I'm sure Hughes would rather sell more DirecTiVo's than allow people to have control over the content they're paying for. That said, they say they have a Linux driver in development (for 2.4 only at this point) and will probably distribute a binary version of said driver once it is available, enabling support for projects like MythTV. I guess the bottom line for me is: if they are willing to give me a modified STB for free, and provide me with a stable driver *or* the source code to an unstable driver, then I will help them integrate their solution into MythTV, despite it being closed-source, because I really want to be able to record high-def DirecTV content. But if they're unwilling to meet me halfway (and to be clear I haven't proposed this to them yet), they're out of luck and can continue to work on it without outside help. Am I being unreasonable? I don't think so, but I thought I'd bounce this off other people before I propose it to them. Cheers, Kyle
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